As talk show host Dennis Prager often says about ABC’s daily liberal mah-jongg circle “The View,” if the program didn’t already exist, someone would have to create it. Save for one well-meaning, but often overmatched (if only by sheer volume), token conservative (Elizabeth Hasselbeck), the program’s panel is a hyper-caffeinated gaggle of cackling leftist yentas. It’s almost amusing.

When Senator John McCain, much to his credit, appeared on the program last week, Whoopie Goldberg – comedienne, actress and constitutional academic - asked him to clarify his viewpoint on the separation between church and state. Her concerns, presumably, of a state-mandated religion becoming an inevitability should a bible-thumping, rifle-nut like Sarah Palin ever rise to the top spot in the land were obviously genuine. (God bless her). Ms. Goldberg went on to point out that the United States is comprised of people belonging to many different religions these days.

She’s good.

First, the obvious point … that one sentence in a private letter from Thomas Jefferson to a Connecticut religious group should, nearly a century-and-a-half after the fact, be the unembellished foundation for the trite, belabored, utilitarian argument for a “wall of separation between church and state” is laughable. (I wonder if Whoopie believes those words are actually in the federal Constitution). What about the endless other writings of Jefferson? How about the words inscribed on his monument in Washington, D.C? Or the words he authored in the Declaration of Independence?

Of course, Jefferson was a slave-holder, so his credibility takes an immediate hit on any issues inconsistent with modern liberalism.

Jefferson’s one-time use of the term in a personal letter was actually written as an attempt at finding common ground with the Baptist community, of which he was not a member. In hoping to ease their concerns, and responding to spreading rumors that a national religion was close to being established (the Congregationalists), Jefferson chose to employ the language and style spoken by Roger Williams, a well-known Baptist preacher, to make his point. Williams had said:

“When they have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the Church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself.”

Jefferson thus wrote:

“I contemplate with solemn reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.”

Second, and most important, even if people like Jefferson, James Madison and George Washington were not openly religious people and did not wear their faith on their sleeves (whatever that faith may have been), it only lends more strength and credence to the countless writings put forth by almost all of the Founding Fathers that without religion and God in everyday life, virtue and morality cannot exist. For instance if, for the sake of argument, Jefferson was an openly acknowledged agnostic (and he certainly wasn’t), the First Amendment is even that much more relevant and the vision and wisdom of the Founding Fathers that much more obvious.

I’m certain Whoopie knew that. It must’ve slipped her mind.

Isn't it amazing what a work-out our First Amendment gets? Three commas, two semi-colons and a single period help to separate and punctuate the forty-five words that comprise the fundamental tenets of our personal freedoms enumerated there. Of those forty-five, none seem to foster such cultural disconnect from the Founder’s intent nearly as much as the first sixteen do. Plain, unambiguous and rock-solid as they appear to be to a two-dimensional originalist like myself, the “big sixteen” are apparently far more malleable than I’d ever realized, laden with nuance and intricacies that even the Founding Fathers were too short-sighted to recognize.

Having been through the first sixteen words of the first amendment hundreds of times, I’ve often wondered if I might ever see what others see in them. I’ve speculated that if I perhaps read carefully enough and concentrate really hard, I might unearth something buried within, perhaps discovering something masterfully woven into the text I hadn't seen before. Unfortunately, I can’t seem to crack that elusive third dimension and continue to come up with nothing other than what the Founders wrote:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

Simpleton that I am, I find nothing indistinct. To me, the phrase “establishment of religion” means designating one specific faith as the official religion of the land and calling it something like the “Church of the United States.” Fortunately, this will never come to pass, nor could it.

All of this seems fairly straightforward, yet “the big sixteen” have inexplicably been twisted by those charged with interpreting and caring for them into somehow meaning that no religious designation of any kind shall be acknowledged, referenced, mentioned or disseminated in any place considered a public setting or forum within the United States, lest it be considered to have been “established” by the federal government. I look across this great country - from Los Angeles, California to rural Kentucky – and see a sad and frightening trend. I see a religious heritage being stripped and banished from the public square by those who have managed to discover things in those sixteen words that simply aren’t there, reinterpreting them to the point where they are actually abolishing the “free exercise thereof.”

A palpable question is: Since when is displaying a religious symbol or acknowledging a religion publicly the same as establishing a religion?

It isn’t. That’s the dirty little secret. I know these sorts of things tend to frighten Whoopie and the rest of the clacking yackers on “The View” – more so than, say, the threat of Islamo-fascist terrorism - but they needn’t worry.

Melting glaciers, second-hand smoke and fatty cooking oil will devastate the planet before Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh and the Illuminati are afforded the opportunity to successfully institute a federally mandated religion.

Andrew Roman, Brooklyn, NY